Janet Raloff

Janet Raloff

Editor, Digital, Science News Explores

Editor Janet Raloff has been a part of the Science News Media Group since 1977. While a staff writer at Science News, she covered the environment, toxicology, energy, science policy, agriculture and nutrition. She was among the first to give national visibility to such issues as electromagnetic pulse weaponry and hormone-mimicking pollutants, and was the first anywhere to report on the widespread tainting of streams and groundwater sources with pharmaceuticals. A founding board member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, her writing has won awards from groups including the National Association of Science Writers. In July 2007, while still writing for Science News, Janet took over Science News Explores (then known as Science News for Kids) as a part-time responsibility. Over the next six years, she expanded the magazine's depth, breadth and publication cycle. Since 2013, she also oversaw an expansion of its staffing from three part-timers to a full-time staff of four and a freelance staff of some 35 other writers and editors. Before joining Science News, Janet was managing editor of Energy Research Reports (outside Boston), a staff writer at Chemistry (an American Chemical Society magazine) and a writer/editor for Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Initially an astronomy major, she earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (with an elective major in physics).

All Stories by Janet Raloff

  1. Animals

    Spider men weave silken tapestry

    It took herculean effort, but Madagascar crafters created an extraordinary piece of woven art from spider silk.

  2. Physics

    Neutrons for military and medical imaging

    An accelerator-based neutron-production system is being designed to cull bombs at risk of exploding prematurely — and make the feedstock for a major isotope used in nuclear medicine.

  3. Health & Medicine

    Peer review: No improvement with practice

    To keep the quality of what they publish high, journals may have to frequently recycle the experts asked to evaluate incoming manuscripts.

  4. Earth

    Cell phones: Precautions recommended

    Scientists make a case for texting and using hand-free technologies with those cell phones to which society has become addicted.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Cell phones: Feds probing health impacts

    Senate hearing finds that biomedical research agencies aren't complacent about potential health effects of cell-phone radiation.

  6. Humans

    Citation amnesia: Not good for our health

    BLOG: Researchers fail to mention previous publications in findings

  7. Humans

    Reviewers prefer positive findings

    Biomedical research journals may be less likely to publish equivocal studies.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Journal bias: Novelty preferred (which can be bad)

    Negative findings in a drug trial may seem ho hum, but they're too important to ignore or leave unpublished.

  9. Desperately Seeking Moly

    Unreliable supplies of feedstock for widely used medical imaging isotope prompt efforts to develop U.S. sources.

  10. Health & Medicine

    Ghost authors remain a chronic problem

    They’re not apparitions, just authors who want to fly below – way below – the radar screen of scientific journals and their readers.

  11. Health & Medicine

    Hearing bolsters case for U.S. moly-making

    Congress today addressed the need to wean America off of reliance on foreign sources of a feedstock of the most widely used isotope in medical imaging.

  12. Chemistry

    50 million chemicals and counting

    BLOG: Chemists race to keep up with a mushrooming proliferation of novel molecules.